This post is the second installment in our learning series exploring insights from our national volunteer participation study, conducted in partnership with Volunteer Canada.
In our first blog, we shared how respondents define volunteering and the meaning it holds for them. For many, volunteering is a deeply personal expression of care, connection, and contribution to their communities, causes they care about, and their own sense of purpose and growth.
In this post, we discuss the countless ways that volunteering can show up. There isn’t just one way to volunteer or contribute time and energy to one’s community. As our respondents shared, volunteering takes many forms—some are structured and formal, while others are spontaneous, relational, and deeply rooted in community care.
Different Ways to Engage
Volunteering is often discussed as either “formal” (structured roles through organizations) or “informal” (acts of care rooted in community or relationships). Our findings affirm that many people think about volunteering beyond simply offering services to an organization, as valuable as those opportunities are. As described by our respondents, volunteering is also found in simple gestures of care and giving a neighbourly helping hand.
As one respondent shared:
“Helping a senior neighbour get groceries is as much volunteering as running a fundraising campaign.”
Another respondent reflected:
“One can be a service volunteer who does tasks that serve an organization’s purpose. This could include working on the women’s guild in a church, repacking eggs at a food bank, helping to build a playground, designing a program for a choir concert, etc.
Of course, there are many things that we do that are not related to organizations. My husband and I shovel the walk of a neighbour who has mobility issues. People volunteer during extreme weather events.”
One participant reminded us that acts of care and volunteering sometimes go unrecognized:
“One of the reasons that volunteering is under-measured is that many people don’t see what they’re doing as ‘volunteer’ activities. I spoke to a woman not long ago who told me she didn’t have time these days for volunteer work because she was so busy at her church.
I asked her what she did at the church, and she said she poured the coffee at the reception after church each Sunday, sent birthday cards to all the children in the church and was the chair of the women’s group. All of those activities are volunteering in my opinion. She had just never thought of it that way.”
People give their time and care in many ways. The table below offers one way to describe the different forms of engagement people can experience as volunteering:
| Type of Volunteering | Description | Examples | Typical Context |
| Formal | Structured Roles within organizations, often with defined responsibilities and time commitments | Sitting on boards, event volunteer shifts, providing mentorship through a nonprofit | Registered nonprofits, institutions |
| Semi-formal | Coordinated but flexible roles, sometimes short-term or project-based | Mutual aid groups, community-led initiatives, pop-up events | Community associations, networks |
| Informal | Unpaid help given directly to individuals or within one’s community, outside formal channels | Helping a neighbour with errands, childcare, cooking for others | Everyday life, kinship and local care |
| Relational/Community Care | Deep, ongoing support embedded in relationships, kin-work, or cultural practices | Caring for elders, emotional support, organizing healing spaces | Families, cultural communities |
Together, these contributions make up the ecosystem of care that sustains our communities. While volunteering also offers personal growth and a sense of purpose, the different ways it shows up in our neighbourhoods, religious places, and households nourish the forms of care, connection, and support that hold communities together. However, if so much of this giving happens beyond formal structures, what should organizations do with that insight?
What Should Volunteer-Engaging Organizations do with the Realities of Informal Volunteering?
In broadening our understanding of volunteerism to include everyday acts of care and relational or community support, a tension emerges: What might this mean for volunteer-engaging organizations? If people are contributing meaningfully outside of formal structures, how might organizational roles shift or adapt, if at all?
While informal volunteering doesn’t replace the critical services delivered by food banks, senior support programs, or health organizations, it does challenge us to rethink the assumptions, language, and structures that have long shaped how we define and manage volunteer engagement.
Rather than undermining formal volunteerism, this study invites organizations to see themselves as part of a broader ecosystem of care—one in which formal and informal contributions coexist, complement, and strengthen each other.
Things to Consider:
- Acknowledge informal volunteering: Recognizing that people support and contribute to their communities in diverse and meaningful ways only helps to amplify the value of volunteering and giving time to one’s community.
- Celebrate community care: Sharing diverse examples of relational, grassroots, or community care alongside stories of formal volunteering broadens our narratives of what volunteering looks like. This strengthens the sense of pride and purpose that people attribute to acts of volunteering.
- Value the unseen: Many roles involve emotional labour or unseen forms of support. For example, volunteers who pour coffee at a church reception, welcome newcomers at an event, or offer a listening ear to someone in distress are performing invaluable acts of hospitality and care. These small gestures can foster feelings and experiences of trust, belonging and safety. Naming and affirming these gestures sends the message that even small acts of kindness and generosity are valuable forms of contribution.
- Learn from informal practices: The trust and warmth that anchor informal acts of care can inform how organizations might design their formal programs, making them more inclusive, human, and reflective of the communities that people come from.
- Act as a connector: By supporting people in communities with resources, tools, and knowledge to foster their initiatives in mutual aid and community care, organizations can help empower individuals to become more engaged and invested in their communities. Sharing resources and providing people with different forms of support also builds relationships, mutual trust, and feelings of connectedness.
What’s Next:
In our next post, we’ll explore how volunteering impacts people’s lives, and what meaningful volunteering experiences might typically involve. We will also launch our full report.
Until then, we invite you to pause and reflect:
Who are the people in your life or community who volunteer without ever being called volunteers? And how might we honour or celebrate them more meaningfully?
Catch up on the series and check out Part 1: